"I have never
done wrong."
The Nazis
claimed that their infamous straight-arm salute had its origins in ancient
Rome, but as with so much else about Nazi Germany, that was a lie. Historians
believe that Italian fascists first used it in the early 1920s to honor their
dictator Benito Mussolini. German fascists admired the salute's militant
posture and adopted it.
"It
must be regarded as a survival of an ancient custom, which originally
signified, "See, I have no weapon in my hand," said Hitler.
On June 13,
1936, Hitler visited the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg to witness the
christening of the warship Horst Wessel. By a strange twist of history, a photograph
taken on that day went relatively unnoticed until it appeared in a Japanese
blog in 2011 that was dedicated to boosting relief efforts for the recovery
from that country's recent earthquake and tsunami.
The
black-and-white photo shows more than 100 men tightly packed together, their
arms outstretched in the Nazi salute, undoubtedly chanting "Heil
Hitler" (Hail, Hitler!) or "Sieg Heil" (Hail, victory!)
An Odd Expression
While there
are a few men in the photo whose arms are not raised, one man stands out. His arms
are crossed with seeming defiance. He has an odd expression, almost a grimace. Tellingly, other men seem not to want to stand beside him.
His name
was August Landmesser, and he was a shipyard worker. He had joined the Nazi
Party five years earlier hoping it would help him land good work which it
apparently did.
In 1935,
however, when he became engaged to Irma Eckler, the party expelled him. Why?
She was Jewish. They were to be married in September of that year, but before
they could exchange vows, the Nazis passed the infamous Nuremberg Laws which forbid
Jews and non-Jews to marry. (It also made legal other severe forms of discrimination
against Jews.) Their first daughter Ingrid was born the next month.
In 1937
they lovers tried to flee to Denmark but were arrested at the border. When
Eckler became pregnant again, the Nazi arrested Landmesser, accusing him of
violating the Nuremberg Laws. He was tried and found guilty.
In a small
gesture of leniency, the court accepted his assertion that he thought Irma was
only part Jewish, and he was not jailed. When she was a child, she had been baptized as a Protestant
when her mother remarried. As a parting gesture, the court warned him that if
he continued on the same path, he would be imprisoned.
Racial Infamy
Two
months later he was seized again. He begged the court for leniency writing it,
"My fiancee is expecting our second child any time now. Now I
would like to marry her before this occurs and not leave her alone with the two
children. I also ask that it be taken into consideration that I have never done
wrong and that in this case the crime was committed thoughtlessly and, as it
were, in a state of mental confusion, first due to the constant questions of
acquaintances about how I' m going to manage and pay for everything once the
second child arrives."
He found
guilty and sent to Borgermoor concentration camp where he served two-and-a-half
years of a three-and-a-half year sentence for dishonoring the Aryan race—racial
infamy ("Rassenschande").
A newspaper
account of the trial read: "In passing sentence, the Court
maintained that if the purity of the Gennan race is to be successfully
maintained, then such violations of the Race Protection Law
(Rassenschutzgesetze) must be severely punished; that applies to Aryans as much
as Jews. However, in this case the Court did not totally ignore the human
aspect of the case. The Court was concerned not so much with the relationship
of the accused with the woman involved, who is hardly a very worthy character,
but rather his relationship with his children, for which the Court has every
sympathy. However, the situation was aggravated by the defendant resuming the
forbidden relationship and thus acknowledging neither restraint nor repentance.
This was also the reason for the Court's decision to impose a sentence of penal
servitude."
Landmesser
never saw his wife again.
Meanwhile,
the Gestapo arrested Eckler and sent her to prison where she gave birth to her
second daughter Irene. From there, she was sent to a series of concentration
camps, finally ending up at Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp, before
being taken to the Bernburg Euthanasia Center where it is believed she was
murdered in February 1942. (The Nazis used this facility to kill
mentally ill, sick, elderly, and disabled people as a part of its racial
cleansing program. A total of 9,384 innocents were killed there in a gas
chamber that used carbon monoxide.)
Freed from
prison in early 1941, Landmusser worked as a laborer until being drafted in
1944 into a battalion composed only of former prisoners. Strapped for manpower
and possessed with limitless cruelty, the Nazis used such battalions for
dangerous missions, such as minefield clearing, where large numbers of
casualties were expected. He survived until October of that year and died in
combat in Croatia.
Ingrid and
Irene had been sent to an orphanage prior to their parents' deaths. The Nazis
allowed Ingrid to live with her Aryan grandmother, and she did so until 1953.
A family
friend took Irene to relative safety across the border into occupied Austria.
When she returned to Germany during the war, she was put in a hospital, which was told that her identity papers had been lost. Later both children were
placed with foster parents. In 1958, Irene published her family's memoirs which
mostly consisted of reprints of Nazi documents which lay out the course
of events that befell her family.
MORAL: Never forget.
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